Project Mandalore
by Nixonhacker
Summary: After Episode VIII. As the Resistance rallies itself and the First Order fights back the chaos within its own ranks in the wake of the death of Supreme Leader Snoke, Rey feels a foreboding disturbance in the Force from a long-abandoned Republic military base on the mysterious planet Kamino.


_A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…._

 **STAR WARS**

 **PROJECT MANDALORE**

 _It is a time of uncertainty and upheaval in the galaxy. SUPREME LEADER SNOKE, destroyed by the Jedi apprentice REY, has left behind a massive military engine in chaos. The insidious KYLO REN has declared himself the new Supreme Leader of the First Order, and continues a campaign of violence and conquest to exert his supremacy over the tattered Republic, and the Force itself._

 _As the few surviving members of the brave Resistance, commanded by GENERAL LEIA ORGANA, gather their strength and allies to challenge the First Order anew, Rey has sensed a great disturbance in the Force that has led her to the abandoned world of Kamino, and the latest First Order plot…._

I

"Never seen storms like this," Poe Dameron's voice came crackling over the comm, shaking Rey's gaze away from the X-Wing's guidance instruments and back to the radar.

Nobody had known what to expect on Kamino, the world that had become the seat of the Clone Wars, yet which appeared on no maps or charts. It was spoken of as some storied and legendary place, a reputation Rey had always suspected it didn't truly deserve. Only a minor mention of its positioning in some old war records, buried amid the small trove of information Leia had stolen from the Republic Archive Memory before her flight into exile with the Resistance, had given Rey anything to go on about its position at all. They had all shared a look, huddled around the repurposed Holo-chess table as it displayed the entry, when they saw who had written that lone entry: Obi Wan Kenobi.

Yet, Rey's hunch had been right. They'd managed to slip in-system undetected by jumping in behind one of the two massive moons of Kamino, the Shattered Moon, a celestial body rent nearly in half by an asteroid strike some untold millennia ago. There amidst the swirling debris – rocks the size of small islands or old warships – the two T-65 X-Wings and their anti-sensor ferrosphere paint went unnoticed by the First Order cruiser lazily hanging above the planet in geo-synchronous orbit. The First Order had indeed come to Kamino, and as Leia had put it, that could mean only one thing.

" _Clones."_

 _Finn's face had hardened at the single word from Leia's lips._

" _This is bad. I mean…_ really _bad," he said. "General Hux was always talking about scrapping Project Resurrection and replacing us with clones. He might finally have gone off the deep end."_

"It must be the moons," Rey answered Poe. "Lunar gravitational pull, all this tidal force. I feel conflict here, even in the air and the water."

"Well, I don't know much about that," Poe said (which is what he usually said when she began talking that way), "but we're definitely coming up on some kind of permanent settlement. A big one, from the looks of it. I think we'd better get below deck. You okay keeping it below 200 meters? These T-65s may be old, but they still handle a lot jumpier than the _Falcon_."

Rey smiled and went into a careful descent, plunging below the cloud cover as Poe maneuvered to stay beside her. For the first time, she got some visibility, though it was swept away immediately by the pounding rain. The instruments – and the Force – showed her an uninterrupted surface of rolling surf.

"Who do you think you're talking to?" she said, and Poe did not bother to send another tight-beam message as he laughed.

Just as Rey began to wonder what Poe had been talking about, her passive scanners began picking up signals ahead. And, as if on cue, a grand structure came into view – many massive, domed buildings rising from struts out of the vastness of the roiling ocean, connected by bridges. She twisted a knob on her helmet's side to adjust the magnification, the ship's targeting computer highlighting what it surmised to be landing pads, residences, power generators, turbolasers.

And one final thing. A massive shape, lumbering up and down with the waves, seeming to collide gently with one of the many struts holding up one of the larger megastructures.

"That's a _Venator_ -class cruiser, real Old Republic star destroyer!" Poe said. "Doesn't look functional. I'm seeing structural damage all over this place, too. My scanners are picking up some life, but it just looks like fauna. What's your uh… Jedi stuff telling you?"

"My 'Jedi Stuff,'" Rey said "tells me this is a trap, Poe. You know they can hide lifeforms inside structures that large, and besides… I have a very bad feeling about this. I think you should pull back and rendezvous with Finn and Snap. I'll see what's happening here and send word if I need it."

BB-8's familiar bloops came cutting in over the comm, the frantic chattering conveying only one possible thing.

"Our little friend is right, Leia said I'm supposed to protect you. Something about you being our only hope, remember?" Poe said. "If the First Order's in orbit, they must be somewhere here."

"She also said to trust me, Poe. Just keep me covered."

"You're the boss," he said. "I've got enough fuel to cruise out of visual range and then get us back to the rendezvous, but you've got four hours. Keep radio silence unless you can find a tight-beam comm… or if you really screw the wookiee."

"Charming," Rey said, and Poe watched as she angled herself lower to the water and locked her S-foils into attack position. "Take care of yourself."

"You, too," Poe said, though he didn't broadcast it. In the astromech slot behind him, BB-8 twittered nervously. "Hey, don't jinx it, all right? You'll see her—"

The turbolaser seared the air above his port S-foils and instinct didn't let go of his body until after he'd fired retro-boosters to go into a drifting yaw and then rolled to break to port in the same moment he opened the ship's wings and powered on shields.

"Rey, get out of here! They saw us coming! My scope's showing those turbolasers are all hot!"

"There aren't any guns on the underside!" Rey called back, and Poe watched as, just as he'd shown her, she performed a barrel roll, blaster fire scything the air where her X-Wing had been. She'd done an aileron roll the first time he'd asked, and it was an awkward and amusing moment when she'd admitted she hadn't known the difference.

"And we're dead if we try to climb anyway," Poe agreed, another blast just missing his shields. "I'll try to draw their fire, you stay low and see if you can find an access point. We can—"

The next shot slammed into Poe's shields, jostling his comms. Rey centered herself, throttling up, going through the motions Poe and Rose had taught her. She could feel his alertness and alarm, the joy of battle that always seized him, but below all of that, she could feel the immovable steel of his pilot's nerves, and it was instructive. The old T-65 had been the best they could do, and without an astromech with her, it would be even more disastrous if one of her components went out. But it had to hold.

Blue bolts of light arced from the megastructure in a dozen places, but Rey saw that more of them were targeting Poe than her, and that her own erratic barrel rolls and serpentine maneuvers were throwing off the targeting. She was still too far out of range to return fire—

A laser popped her shield like an oil bubble, the power surge spilling over into auxiliary systems and taking out her guidance instruments. The scent of ozone choked the cockpit.

"Rey, do you copy? Rey? REY?! Can you—"

Fastening the emergency oxygen mask and breathing deeply, Rey focused ahead of her.

 _A place to land. The space between their fire. The waves. The structures._

She was getting closer, closing the distance, when her targeting computer drunkenly snapped back on and gave a clear signal on one of the turbolasers. Yawing to starboard and rolling to port to avoid another salvo, she found good tone and launched both proton torpedo bays.

They hated that, she saw, as more of the lasers turned to track her, even as her shot totally destroyed one of them and set another on fire. Just as she felt certain she'd be carved apart, more flashes of red slashed across the line of turrets and she watched as Poe's guns shredded two, then three, then a fourth gun battery…

Before another bolt of blue sheered off her lower left wing and sent her into a flat spin. Klaxons blared, her readouts all went dead, she felt her innards straining against her bones and skin as the g-force pulled at her.

 _Fly._

The voice sounded not in her ear but somewhere deep in her mind, in her bones. Familiar.

 _The Force is with you. Reach out._

She had the flight stick in her hand, her feet were using the pedal controls to fire attitudinal thrusters, and she'd shut down engine 4 to compensate. It all seemed like the right thing to do. Her comms were out, but she saw Poe's X-Wing deftly avoid another blast before tearing apart another turret in the moment before she rocketed beneath the structure and among the struts, the sudden silence from the abrupt cessation of the rain almost breaking her concentration…

And then that silence was filled with the roar of TIEs. Her computer did her one last favor, highlighting a strut a klick ahead of her with an obvious access point for watercraft, and then the green lasers tore her rear fuselage apart.

 _Get out of there!_

She had enough time to grab hold of her staff, tucked into a long compartment Poe had fashioned for her himself, chiding her all the time on how it wasn't exactly safe, just as she pulled the eject lever. The cockpit canopy burst away and her seat launched into the air, and she felt Poe's panic so acutely she could almost hear his shout in her own ears.

Then there was the gut-wrenching feeling of falling, the panicked realization that her chute wasn't opening, and then the savage kiss of the water as the roar of the enemy aircraft and the roll of the planet's deep-throated thunder echoed in her ears.

II

"Rey, no!" Poe shouted as she vanished from his scope, the instrument's feedback coldly informing him Black 2 was down. It was a squad of a dozen TIEs, spilling out of a hangar somewhere on the underside of the megastructure and boiling up at him as if out of the depths of the sea itself. The turrets couldn't track him at this close range, but even he couldn't go up against a whole squad of TIE/sf.

"BB-8, send a general distress signal to Snap and get ready to do something _really_ stupid!" Poe said, dive-bombing into the mess of bridges and struts below the deck of the megastructure, the TIEs scattering away and funneling after him. "Get me a scan of that _Venator_."

One eye on the schematics that BB-8's screen pulled up for him and the other on the mounting cluster of red blips in his rear scope, Poe cut across the axis of the _Venator_ and found the opening BB-8 had shown him – a gaping hole where one of the main thrusters had been before whatever explosion that had downed the craft had ripped it out.

BB-8's shrill whistling cut into Poe's headset as he angled the X-Wing into the opening and throttled through the gate.

"How do you think _I_ feel about it?" Poe shouted back, barely missing a massive maintenance gantry that hung askance from the wall of the cylindrical engine compartment, a mere split-second before one of his pursuers plowed into it and sent fire and debris everywhere. "Just find the ion core and get a weapons lock for me!"

Few pilots could pull a J-turn from one engine shaft of a star destroyer through a fuel line into another engine shaft, but Poe and these pilots were among that small group. Two more of the pursuing interceptors slammed into the walls, one of them bouncing off and colliding with a third fighter. BB-8's readout told him that the third and final engine shaft had just one last trick for him, and as he reached another fuel line and burned his retro thrusters to make the hairpin maneuver, lasers cut through his shields, searing his targeting computer and shorting out the heads up display.

He heard BB-8's shrieks, felt his engines stutter for a moment, cursed the thoughts that whined within him, telling him that the T-70 and the T-85 wouldn't have had these problems, and then he was flying purely from memory and reaction, eyes front and all noise around him silent. Rey had told him once that the Force was strong with him, and he didn't know much about that, but he knew to trust his eyes and his gut when he flew.

Those reflexes, that skill, were what helped him thread the needle through the gap between the blades of a massive cooling fan that lead from the engine shaft straight to the ion core – perhaps the one last major component of this hulking brute that wasn't destroyed.

Yet.

As Poe banked to starboard and pulled up just in time to miss another electrical cable that clotheslined another of his pursuers in half, he caught sight of the massive reaction chamber that formed the ion core which powered the older ion cannons mounted to the ship. He'd read plenty about how they could be used as auxiliary power in the event the main reactor core shut down. And as such, he knew that even in a dormant ship, they were still volatile in an enclosed space.

"All power to shields, buddy! Get ready to eject!" Poe cried out, hearing the good tone and launching the one proton torpedo his craft could still manage. A streak of blue sailed out and cracked the core like an egg.

The explosion was the most incredible thing Poe had ever seen, he thought as he pulled the eject lever, BB-8 howling as he, too, ejected from the astromech slot.

Keeping a TIE fighter airborne in an atmosphere on a planet with gravity is entirely a question of thrust, and so when the wave of charged ions crashed over the handful of TIEs that remained in pursuit and their engines completely shut down, they fell out of the air like stones. Poe's chute deployed in time to cushion his fall from a fatal one to merely incredibly rough. It was a moment before he could even raise his head to look around, barely aware of BB-8's plaintive wails somewhere nearby.

That was when he saw the cloaked figure standing above him, blaster carbine trained right at his head.

"What's all this noise in my house?" the man asked, and had Poe heard that accent somewhere before?

He passed out before he could place it.

III

 _Of course she was back on Ach-To. Sometimes, even after weeks on the run inside the_ Falcon _or aboard a Resistance cruiser, she would still wake up thinking she was there for a few crucial moments until she remembered. She looked up, felt that she was wearing her old robes again, instead of the confining flight suit. And there, sitting cross-legged, gazing out toward the twin suns, was Luke Skywalker._

" _This isn't happening," she said, not a question._

" _That is debatable," he responded, and she could see his eyes were closed. He seemed, she thought, to be concentrating intensely. "You should try to wake up soon."_

" _What is happening here? Why was I drawn to a place nobody even remembers?" Rey asked._

" _Something is not as it seems," Luke said, and she wasn't sure if he was speaking to her or to himself. "There is an_ absence _in the Force here. A hole. A darkness. You've felt it."_

" _Yes. I didn't know what name to give it."_

" _Naming something gives it power. And whatever is here on Kamino must be stopped, Rey. This isn't another bombastic superweapon. I fear it's altogether a worse sort of hubris."_

 _Here, he finally opened his eyes to look at her. Without looking at it, he pointed to her staff._

" _You know that isn't the answer?"_

 _She nodded._

" _Only until I don't need it."_

 _He considered saying something, but did not, turning instead back to the suns._

" _In that way, at least, you're a little wiser than I was."_

 _He faded away, the sun piercing her eyes._

" _Too old, he said to me," Luke mused, and now he wasn't talking to her at all. "Maybe I was."_

 _He was gone, but his voice spoke one last time to her._

" _You can fly. Can you swim?"_

Rey's eyes shot open, her iron grip on the staff tightening. She coughed water out of her lungs and struggled, fighting to the surface, slinging the staff so she could get her hands free to remove the boots, in which she couldn't hope to swim. She was well beneath the hulking shadow of the great megastructure above her – the city-sized building suspended above by bridges and one single strut stabbing downward into the water, still about a klick away from her. That was the entrance her instruments had revealed to her, and it was toward there, with bruised limbs and burning lungs, she began to swim.

She wanted desperately to just stand still and take a moment to listen to the Force – to glean anything about where she was and where she needed to go, about what might be waiting for her, but there was no time. Staying still meant dying, meant drowning, meant being found by whatever First Order goons still hunted for her. She had no idea how long she'd been out or what had happened to Poe, but the utter silence in the skies unnerved her.

As Rey approached the strut, she found it was even more massive than it had appeared at a distance – at least 30 meters in diameter. The paint job was streaked with rust, and Rey understood that the place truly had been abandoned ages ago. It was the only way to explain the decay. She found handholds near the bottom, something for maintenance workers in diving gear to use to plumb deep to the ocean base of the strut, no doubt, and used them to drag herself up into a walkway. The walkway seemed to run the circumference of the strut, guardrails bent and gapped like a mouth of ill-kept teeth.


End file.
